Image 1: Martina Gerdts and a chessboard in front of the camera. During my online classes, I mention a few things about myself – like my love for chess – and then ask my students to tell us a bit about themselves. What matters to you? What would you put in front of the camera?

Different ways of learning something new

Do you know what’s the biggest difference for me about learning chess with the Lichess app and languages with the Babbel app? …besides one being an open non-profit project based on volunteers and the other being a for-profit project of a for-profit company? Lichess includes community. There are chats, there are ways to share your own studies with friends, there are ways to share your thoughts with the world and to interact with each other. So, while I might be learning with study material on a screen, I am still able to connect to people. With the opportunity of sharing a link to a game with my coach, I can show my chess group some moves etc. 

Duolingo has some „community perks“ like boards and some level of interaction and competition is possible. But I can’t even access every lesson when I want to work on it (correct me if that has changed at some point). With AI being more and more important for Duolingo, there are some additional questions to be discussed around … the environmental impact of the use of AI, the impact on language professionals and their jobs and the quality of material if it was generated by LLMs. Those questions have to be discussed in a wider setting and it’s obviously not just about Duolingo. I frequently get emails for workshops around the use of AI in language teaching and learning by lots of companies and institutions. At this point I know less and less language-related institutions that aren’t doing that.

The Babbel app is focusing on individual learning. You can share Babbel magazine articles with friends or podcast episodes, but you can’t share your lessons or vocabulary slides. That’s the thing with knowledge and education behind a paywall, of course. With Babbel for Business or having a friend group with several people doing the same units you might be nearest to something along the lines of learning in a community with the app itself. With Babbel Live, they created something that resulted in human interaction … in learning in a community directly. Why are we learning languages? Is it for human interaction? Or for communication with an AI robot for bank account customer support?

The community in Babbel Live was restricted to the classes. Interaction between classes wasn’t planned for. But during classes, there was real human interaction.

Babbel Live experiences from a teacher’s perspective

In my time as a Babbel Live German teacher, I was able to teach German learners all around the world. When students, especially beginners, weren’t yet ready to communicate everything in German or if they had questions, we made use of bridging languages. Most of the time, that was English but as not everyone speaks English and as everyone’s English levels vary, we have also used other bridging languages like Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian. I used pictures from Internet searches, explained concepts in different languages or drew little images of things if German synonyms or explanations weren’t working anymore. During those classes, we were able to compare German words, phrases, grammar and pronunciation with the languages my students were already speaking: Farsi, Urdu, Hindi, Polish, Slovak, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Korean, Croatian, Greek, Albanian, Ukrainian, Romanian, Malay, Azerbaijani, Russian, Turkish … and many many more. 

Opportunities through online language classes

Online classes gave us the opportunity to connect people during COVID quarantine with each other; people who couldn’t travel for money reasons could get international interaction and connections to teachers on the other side of the planet; working people who have to do all the care work in their family could connect from home or from their lunch break. And let’s be honest, you can’t get a language teacher even for English, German, Italian, Spanish and French for A1 to C1 classes in any given city – let alone village. The same is true for language teaching gigs, by the way. 

The way of how people around the world are learning languages is changing: Babbel Live classes for private customers are closing

Publicly, the news made the rounds with a LinkedIn post by Markus Witte, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Babbel, according to his LinkedIn bio. Markus Witte wrote on Wednesday (May 21^st, 2025) that the Babbel Live classes for private customers would close in the end of June. For the whole post, check out the LinkedIn statement by Markus Witte about the Babbel Live closing.

As I said before, Babbel is a for-profit company. They have to do what they have to do. Business decisions aren’t always related to all the things we want to matter. In a week when the government of the United States of America tries to forbid Harvard University to teach international students (see CNN article, „Federal judge halts Trump administration ban on Harvard’s ability to enroll international students“), it doesn’t feel like good news if an e-learning company like Babbel closes one of their offerings with more direct worldwide human interaction, however. There are other ways of learning languages and teaching languages with online classes. This product focused “only” on English, German, French, Spanish and Italian, so, it never was the answer for everything anyways. And at least their B2B language classes seem to stay. We’ll see what the future brings for that one.

Maybe I’m getting old, maybe I’m getting scared by national, international and world events … but connecting communities is quite a good thing, isn’t it? It looks like for-profit projects aren’t always the solution for everything. But let me end this article on a more positive note. In German, we say “Wo sich eine Tür schließt, da öffnet sich eine andere”, meaning when one opportunity is shutting down, another will rise. I’m not exactly subscribing to that expression … but the Internet, videoconference systems and language learning material keep existing, right? Let’s connect in other – maybe even more sustainable?- ways.

Image 2: Martina Gerdts with her language learning material in the background. You really just need a device, Internet connection, some communication software and language material to be able to learn or teach online.

From a more local Germany-based perspective

A more positive development that lets me look more optimistic into the future from at least a Germany-based perspective is that our local community schools for adult education, Volkshochschulen as they are called, are more and more open for online and hybrid online/in-person classes. This way, people from different villages or cities can more easily access classes that would take place in a city too far away, same for people who can’t leave their home for individual reasons, and same for teachers who wouldn’t get enough students at several schools but enough if those students come together in one online space.